Des rapports observés entre les moyens d’existence et l’état social des peuples d’espèce nègre des c

CHAP. 27: > Of the relations observed between the means of existence and the social state of the peoples of the negro species of the western coasts of Africa situated between the tropics. — Of the kind of inequalities that exist among these peoples. — Of the morals that result from these inequalities. — Parallel between the morals of these peoples and the morals of the peoples of the same species who live at the southern extremity of this continent.

The diverse classes of which a people is composed exercise upon one another such an extensive influence that it is almost impossible to form exact ideas of the morals of each of the fractions of which it is formed, if one does not begin by forming a general idea of the social order seen as a whole. I must therefore make known here, as in the preceding chapters, what the general constitution of each association is, before expounding what relations exist, whether between the diverse fractions of which each people is composed, or between the nations brought into contact by commercial relations or a contiguity of territory.

In studying the morals of the peoples of the Malay species, spread throughout the islands of the great Ocean, we have perceived, in the archipelagos closest to the equator, two races of men on the same soil: a race of vanquished cultivating the land of which they were once the masters, living in contempt and misery, not even having dwellings in which to rest, obliged to feed on the vilest foods, and being without connections to one another; and a race of victors, organized for the interest of the conquest; living in idleness or engaging only in the exercises proper to maintaining their superiority over the vanquished, granting esteem only to objects of which they can have exclusive possession, absolute masters of the dwellings, the lands, and even the cultivators. We have seen, moreover, the social organization, quite complicated in the same archipelagos, weaken or simplify as one moves away from the islands that have made the most progress in the arts, and disappear almost entirely when one arrives at the extremity of the southern lands, in New Zealand or in Van Diemen's Land. Finally, we have seen the malevolent passions multiply and become more energetic, and weak beings treated in a harsher or more cruel manner, as we have drawn closer to the state of barbarism.

The peoples of the Ethiopian species offer us in the center and at the southern extremity of Africa a spectacle analogous to that which the Malay species presented to us in the great Ocean, and the copper-colored species in America. The most remarkable difference that we will find between the peoples of the negro species of Africa and the peoples of the same race observed in New Holland and Van Diemen's Land, is that the former have made a little more progress than the latter.

The peoples of the western coast of Africa situated between the equator and the tropic of Capricorn, although all belonging to the Ethiopian species, do not appear to have inhabited the soil since the same epoch. If one judges them by their social organization, and by the denominations with which they designate some of their chiefs, one perceives instantly that a race of conquerors has made itself master of the soil and of the men who inhabited it, and that it has organized itself to maintain possession of the territory and the conquered peoples, like the Malays of the great Ocean and the barbarians who spread over almost all parts of Europe [736].

The peoples of these regions draw almost all their means of existence from agriculture. The land, divided into private properties, is of an extraordinary fertility. With the exception of wheat, it produces all the food plants that grow in Europe, and could produce all those that can grow only under the tropics; it yields two and sometimes three harvests in the course of a year. The inhabitants are therefore obliged to have fixed dwellings, and consequently they are more subjugated than are the natives of Van Diemen's Land and New Holland [737].

The negroes of the Congo are subject to a general chief whom they name foumou and to whom European travelers give the name of king. This chief, who in the beginning was probably only the general of a conquering army, makes his residence at Loango, the most agreeable part of the country. All the chiefs who reside in other parts of the territory consider him their superior. The king, besides the power he has over his great vassals or over his nobility, is master of several villages that depend immediately on him, and which form, properly speaking, the domain of the crown.

The general chief does not transmit his power to the first-born of his children; if he dies, his great officers form a council of regency, and name a successor for him: the grandees of the negro species have preserved a prerogative that the conquerors of the other species have allowed to die out. The king can be elected only from among the grandees; but it is sufficient to be born a prince to be eligible.

“One could suppose,” says Degrandpré, “that the victor, after having established the seat of his power in this country, gave fiefs to his children or to his principal chiefs in faith and homage, and on condition of a tribute that likely was always diminishing, as was the authority of the suzerain, and which is no longer recognized except by the slight vestige of the homage that subsists today [738].”

The distinctions of rank are as pronounced among the negroes of the western coast of Africa, and the laws of etiquette as well observed, as in the most monarchical state of Europe. In the feudal hierarchy of the negroes, the king is the first personage of the State; the born princes are placed in the second rank; the husbands of princesses hold the third; the suzerains or great vassals are in the fourth; the brokers and merchants come next, and finally the individuals who form the mass of the people, and who are designated by the name of garçons, hold the last rank [739].

The chiefs or nobles have, over all the individuals who are within the extent of their domains, a limitless power. They can sell them, exchange them, put them to death, as they judge suitable. The only check that stops them, in the exercise of their power, is the fear of seeing them emigrate to another land, and thus weakening their power in comparison to their rivals. There exist among them two sorts of slaves: those who are attached to the land, like those of our feudal regime; others who are attached to nothing, and who are placed in the rank of movable objects. Neither the one nor the other has anything of his own: their lord or master considers as his property all that they acquire. He obliges them to follow him to war; and if they escape, he reclaims them from the other grandees, on whose lands they have taken refuge. War is sometimes necessary to obtain their restitution.

The born princes and the husbands of princesses themselves have great vassals over whom they exercise the same power that the latter have over their slaves; but this power is modified by the power that these vassals possess, and probably also by the fear of seeing them place themselves under the protection of another master.

Finally, the king claims to have over all the grandees, of whatever order they may be, the born princes excepted, a limitless power; but this pretension is admitted only when it is supported by a sufficient force. The grandees resist him when his power becomes abusive; however, as each of them can hope to be elected king, they respect prerogatives that, one day, may be their own. Several of these great vassals are of such high importance that they render faith and homage to the general chief only by sending him a prince of their blood, and that they themselves take the title of king or foumou of the country over which they dominate: such are those of Cabinda, Malemba, and Mayumba. The emissary of the king, or great vassal of Cabinda, takes precedence over all the others in ceremonies; for the grandees of the negro species are no less punctilious about the rules of etiquette than the grandees of other colors.

The power of all the grandees is hereditary, and is transmitted by order of primogeniture. But more jealous than the princes of other races of preserving the purity of their blood, or less confident in the virtue of the wives of princes, the negroes think that nobility is transmitted only through women. Thus, the children of a woman of royal blood are always princes whatever their father may be; but the children of a prince never take any other rank than that which their mother gives them. The infidelities of princesses are therefore never affairs of state among the peoples of the negro species, and when the birth is an uncontested fact, legitimacy can never be a subject of doubt.

The king enjoys the prerogative of distributing to his immediate vassals any land that is not occupied, a privilege that belongs, in general, to any chief of a conquering army. It is by means of the lands of which he thus disposes, and of a certain number of serfs that he takes from his private domains, that he forms appanages for the princes who have none. The king has, moreover, the prerogative of receiving a tribute in women, which the great vassals pay him at certain times, and particularly at his accession to the crown. He establishes the taxes he feels he has the power to make them pay; these taxes are established on luxury objects, on the sale of slaves, or else they are collected as tolls; finally, he sells the public offices that are at his nomination.The officers who are at the monarch's nomination are persons of high importance. A first minister, who takes the title of capitaine-mort, is the one who is the organ of the king's will, and who conveys it, whether to the great vassals, or to his other officers; as he can himself inspire or modify the will he is charged with transmitting, he makes himself feared by all his master's subjects. A second minister, designated by the name of mafouc, is the intendant general of commerce; all commercial affairs are within his jurisdiction; and, as he cannot suffice alone, he has under his orders a certain number of officers. A third minister, who bears the name of mambouc, serves as an intermediary between the king and the merchants, and plies the trade of a broker: these functions being devolved to the first prince who moreover possesses great power, give him a very extensive influence. A fourth minister, designated by the name of monibanze, is invested with the administration of finances: it is he who is charged with the collection of taxes and the payment of expenses. A fifth officer, known by the name of maquimbe, is charged with policing the port; he judges litigious affairs jointly with the mafouc. A sixth kind of officers are the governors of the villages that depend immediately on the royal power, a kind of prefects whose principal functions consist in policing. Finally, the monibèles are a seventh kind of officers; their functions consist in being bearers of the orders of their immediate superiors. Each of the grandees has a monibèle; the king's is one of the first dignitaries of the State, and one no more thinks of doubting the orders of which he says he is the bearer, than one thinks of doubting in France the ordinances or laws published by the Moniteur.

Each of the king's vassals renders justice to the men who are in his domains; but he does not judge alone; he is only the president of a tribunal that the negroes designate by the name of cabal, a word they have adopted from the French. This tribunal renders justice only in public, and in the midst of the assembled multitude. If a case is to be judged in a foreign jurisdiction, the lord transports himself to the country where the judgment is to be rendered; he takes up the defense of his vassals and tries to have a decision rendered in their favor. He answers for them up to a certain point; he pays their debts, unless they are too considerable; for then he sells them himself to discharge them.

If one of the parties is dissatisfied with the judgment rendered by his lord's tribunal, or if he has to complain of a denial of justice, he can appeal to the king. But the only advantage he can hope for from his appeal consists in finding a refuge on the royal lands, an advantage that ceases to exist whenever emigration is a more serious evil than that of which one complains. However, as the great vassals of the crown fear to see their serfs desert their domains, they give themselves over to oppression with impunity only when they are supported by their own master.

In criminal proceedings, the accused are submitted to the judgment of their God. If a great crime is committed, the accused appears before the priests in the presence of the people, and requests the ordeal of poison. A priest immediately presents him in a cup with a liquor he has prepared; if the poison produces no effect, the accused is acquitted; if, on the contrary, it acts, the accused is torn to pieces at the first symptoms of poisoning that manifest themselves. This ordeal is called swallowing the fetish.

The priests can refuse an accused the ordeal of poison, and submit him to the ordeal of fire. This consists in holding a burning coal in the hand; if the accused feels no effect from it, he emerges triumphant from the ordeal; he is led back to his home with solemnity, carrying before him the fetish that has defended him.

“Whatever the means the priests employ to preserve the skin from the action of fire,” says Degrandpré, “it is certain that they know how to render it incombustible; and that, by means of a prior preparation, they make those whom their hatred or their vengeance has doomed to death succumb at will. They are, in this respect, all the more formidable as they direct the accusations and one is acquitted only by dint of presents.

“It sometimes happens,” continues the same writer, “that a man is submitted to the ordeal for a crime committed twenty leagues away from him, although the alibi is proven. Such is their superstition, that they are firmly persuaded that one has the power to send to whomever one wishes the evil wind (it is thus that they designate, in French, the evil spirit), and that, by this means, one can make oneself guilty of the death of a man however distant. All unexpected deaths are for the priests motives for ordeals from which one is acquitted only by satisfying their cupidity, unless they have particular reasons to make the accused succumb, whom nothing then can save [740].”

A grandee can be accused of an offense like a man of the lowest ranks; he can, consequently, incur the penalty of death or slavery; but, if he happens to be condemned, he delivers a man from his lands, and it is upon this man that the sentence is executed [741].

The feudal government of which I have just traced the picture is established among all the peoples of the western coast of Africa, over an extent of nearly forty degrees of latitude; and it is probably no less ancient there than in the States of Europe [742].

These kings, these ministers, these grandees of the negro species, are neither less proud of their titles and their birth, nor less jealous of their prerogatives than are the corresponding personages who exist among the peoples of the other species. But one must not imagine that the same similitude is found in the external circumstances: the monarch of Loango is a negro who wears no clothing, who walks barefoot, who inhabits a straw hut, who sits on the ground and eats with his fingers; his ministers, his great vassals, are no better provided for and live no better than he; but that in no way affects their dignity, nor their importance; the power, the ranks, the distances, are the same [743].

Having expounded the social organization or the distribution of powers of the peoples who inhabit the western coast of Africa, from Cape Negro to the Sahara desert, it would now be necessary to expound the manner in which these powers are put to use. Does the general chief use his power over his great vassals and over the men of his domains in a cruel manner? Do the great vassals treat their subordinates and their serfs with more humanity than the grandees of the Malay race treat theirs?

The morals of the peoples of the Ethiopian species have been observed in Africa with less care and perseverance than the peoples of the Malay species of the islands of the great Ocean. The travelers who have visited them have, in general, had less instruction, and have been less numerous: the facts we possess are, consequently, smaller in number and do not have the same certainty. We possess enough, however, to make us judge the moral state of the population.

These peoples, like those of the islands of the great Ocean, are divided into diverse classes; they recognize no other distinctions than those of birth or race; all their wealth consists in lands, and the lands belong only to the grandees. From this we can draw the consequence that all useful labors are despised and cast upon the inferior classes, and that the son of a conqueror of the negro species would believe he was debasing himself no less than the son of a conqueror of the Malay or Caucasian species, if he gave himself over to any kind of labor. This is, in effect, what is observed in the colonies of America where slavery is established; if a noble of the negro species, sold by his suzerain or taken in war, finds himself among the slaves, nothing can oblige him to derogate from his birth. Prayers, promises, threats, whippings cannot compel him to labor; born to live on the men of his species, any other means of existence is abhorrent to him and seems to him worse than death. Even the negroes who are not born in the aristocratic classes have received from their possessors all their prejudices; they work for them in the European colonies as on the coasts of Africa. On occasions where these noble slaves refuse to work, one sees other slaves fall to their knees and beg the colonists, their masters, to add to their task the task of the captive prince or the distinguished personage, which is sometimes granted to them; and they continue to show the noble personage the same respect as if he were in his own country [744].

The grandees are sometimes sold by their superiors, or by those of their equals who have vanquished them; but in their turn they sell the men who are on their lands. The trade in men, especially since the Christians of Europe have taken part in it, is highly regarded on the coasts of Africa. It is the only merchandise that the grandees of the negro race can give in exchange for those that the Europeans bring them. A grandee who would let himself be torn to pieces by whippings, rather than debase himself to the point of cultivating the land, honors himself by plying the trade of selling human beings: it is to the first prince of the blood that the noble functions of broker are exclusively devolved [745].

The facility with which slave traders load their ships on the coasts of Africa proves that the black nobles sell their serfs with more facility than is said by the traveler who has given us the description of their government. The personages by whom these sales are made are under no illusion as to the fate reserved for the captives; for, in the opinion of these peoples, the Europeans buy men only to eat them [746]. When a king wants to sell a considerable number of slaves to the Christian traders, he makes an invasion into one of his own villages, massacres those of the inhabitants who resist, puts in irons those who could escape by flight, and leaves the others in liberty until the moment of delivering them has arrived [747].

Parents have a boundless power over their children; this power ceases for women only when they marry, and then they become the property of their husbands. The will of women not being consulted in their marriage, a man can take several; he can sell them as he bought them, whenever they are of a rank inferior to his own. Each of the women lives with her children in a separate hut: those who are not princesses are all treated equally, or at least there are no other differences between them than those it pleases the husband to establish; they are all confounded with the slaves. If the husband dies, his wives are the property of his heir [748].

Princes choose, for their wives, the persons who suit them, without consulting either them or their parents; they send them away or sell them, when they are dissatisfied with them. Princesses choose for a husband such an individual as pleases them; but they can have only one at a time; they have the faculty of changing him as often as they judge suitable. It often happens that they take a rich man, ruin him, and send him away to take another whom they also send away after having ruined him. Children never succeed anyone but their mother: an infallible means of preserving property in families according to the principle of feudal government [749].

The principal prerogatives of the aristocratic class consisting in living in idleness and by means of the labors of the other classes, labor is the lot exclusively reserved for the most debased part of the population; it is the share of the women. It is they who cultivate the fields, who are charged with all the domestic cares, and who must provide for the subsistence and needs of the family; by day, they give themselves over to the labors of the countryside; by night they pound the millet that serves as their food [750].

By the effect of the distinction of ranks, the general chief dominates over all men and can never be confounded with them. The princes and princesses dominate over the grandees and treat them with contempt, for they can sell them. The grandees treat their vassals with even more contempt, and keep them at a greater distance; finally, the women, as the weakest beings, form the lowest echelon of the social order. They appear before their husbands only in a humiliating posture; they serve them their food, and nourish themselves only on what they have rejected. This state of abjection that we have found among the Malays and among the negroes of the great Ocean is common to all, to those of the last classes, as to those who are in the first ranks: there is an exception only for the princesses. All the others have to experience the brutality of their husbands; but it is rare that they receive any caresses from them. In their periodic indispositions, they are obliged to sequester themselves in a separate cabin, as among the copper-colored peoples of the north of America; they cannot communicate even with the person who brings them food [751].

The grandees, unable to distinguish themselves from the people by luxury, distinguish themselves from them by the abjection in which they hold them: they let men who are their inferiors approach only on their knees: it is one of the most precious privileges of the aristocracy.

Vengeance is a passion that, among these peoples, is always carried to excess, by any individual who imagines he has received an injury or an insult; it is the most frequent cause of their wars. When war is kindled between two tribes or two nations, all the individuals of which each is composed are treated as enemies; a private quarrel ordinarily produces a general war. They seek to vanquish their enemies by surprise, and avoid combats where they see them prepared [752].

If we compare the social state of the peoples whose morals I described in the preceding chapter, to the social state of the peoples whose morals have been described in this one, some of the former will at first appear to have the advantage. However, when one examines separately the lot of each of the classes of the population, one finds that this advantage has more appearance than reality.

The land is infinitely more fertile on the western coasts of Africa, situated between the tropics, than it is at the Cape of Good Hope. In both countries, women are obliged to give themselves over to the labors required for the family's existence: but, in the latter, with the same quantity of labor one obtains a greater quantity of subsistence. The women, at the same time that they are better nourished, are therefore obliged to work less.

In a country that is naturally very fertile and where several food plants are cultivated, one sees none of those frequent scarcities that we have observed at the Cape, and which oblige the inhabitants to devour the coarsest and most repulsive foods. It is in these terrible moments that each consults only his individual interest, and that egoism shows itself in all its nudity. The weakest are then sacrificed, and consequently the elderly, the sick, the women, the children, are the first to succumb. These miseries do not take place as often, or are less considerable in a country where cultivation has already made some progress, than in a country where hunting and the milk of herds form the principal means of existence.

The negroes of the tropics are subjected to a very harsh subordination; a great number of them are even attached to the soil; but this evil, which is very grave, does not equal that which results from the continual wars that take place between all the hordes of savages. Between the tropics, men have to fear being carried off to be sold as slaves; but among savage hordes each of them must fear at every moment being surprised and exterminated. We have seen, in expounding the morals of the peoples of the Malay species, that there exists less security among the strongest men of New Zealand than there exists among the weakest in the Friendly Islands; we have seen equally that the strongest men among the savages of the north of America are exposed to more dangers than were the weakest men among the agricultural peoples of the same species who lived between the tropics.

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.